Posts Tagged ‘Thanksgiving’

Here in the United States, we use a celebration of Death to kick of the celebration of Life. What am I talking about? Thanksgiving and the Christmas Shopping Season. Although Thanksgiving is dedicated to the Pilgrams landing at Plymouth Rock, it is really a harvest celebration, just a little late in the year. (I for one never believed that people ate outside at Thanksgiving ever! Especially in Massachuesetts.) The roast beast, the trimmings, the goodies, the pies, the whole production is a celebration of the bounty of the land, and the sacrifice made so that Life can go on. Everything on the table will be dead, and that is what the celebration is all about. We give thanks to that which has died so that we can continue.

Unless you live in some place without electricity, you will probably notice that the sky glows at night a lot more than usual in the days after Thanksgiving. Some people already are burning their Christmas, or Yule, lights, and the day after Thanksgiving in the ‘official’ kick off of the Christmas Shopping Season. The Yule Tide was a celebration of Life, of re-birth, of renewal. It started a few days after the Winter Solstice, and ran for days or weeks into January. (What else is January good for, except partying?)

Because merchants want us to buy our gifts, instead of making them ourselves, as was done in the old days, they sponser concerts, public events, lighting displays, and anything eles that they can think of to get people out shopping. Gradually, the Christmas season has swung around from the weeks after the Winter Solstice to the weeks before the Winter Solstice. Inadvertantly, we have moved a festival of Life into a time when the LifeForce is ebbing from the land, leaving nothing for when the days begin to get longer.

To make things even more unsettling, late autumn has always been a time when people tried to conserve their resources as much as possible, by staying close to home, eating very little, and sleeping a lot. For thousands and thousands of years, what food we had would have to last until Spring, at the earliest. So, getting out and being extra active in late autumn just feels wrong somehow.

We must remember our instinctual heritage, what cultures practiced before written history, when analyzing our motivations and emotional responses to modern societie’s demands. There are ample reasons for feeling confused and out of sorts in the weeks ahead, and some we don’t even acknowledge.